Oracle Blog

Adventures in Oracle Solaris 11

Thursday Jul 12, 2012

As product management lead for the Oracle Solaris 11 release back in November 2011, one of the many responsibilities I had was to compile a list of some of the many new features that we've integrated. With well over 15,000 individual putbacks to just the Oracle Solaris kernel alone, compiling a list of interesting features was a pretty big challenge.

Oracle Solaris 10 introduced an incredible number of game changing innovations - the ZFS file system with its ability to prevent against silent data corruption, built in volume management and snapshot and cloning; DTrace, the dynamic tracing framework that allows anyone to safely get a much more accurate view at precisely what is happening on a system at any time; SMF, the service management facility that ensures maximum availability of critical applications and system services with automatic restart should any hardware or software failures occur; and Zones, built-in OS virtualization allowing administrators a way of carving up virtual environments with almost no performance overhead.

Oracle Solaris 11 builds on those strong foundations, delivering a set of features that provide huge value to administrators dealing with complex problems in the data center. We've torn apart some of the assumptions that were made years ago and modernized the operating system to meet the challenges of today - everything from the initial installation and management of software, to setting up virtualized environments in a multi-tenanted cloud environment. The integration with this release has been one of our higest priorities - taking best advantage of the technologies that we've introduced and present them to the administrator to dramatically help in their day-to-day operations. I'll be talking more about these features in future blog posts, but for now, take a look at some of the new features we've introduced.